Ways of Hearing 6 – NOISE

You're listening to Radiotopia Presents from PRX's Radiotopia. We will start with the tones. I try and have my hearing tested regularly. The higher pitches don't work as well in an adult ear canal because the sides are more rigid. I think of it as dealing with an occupational hazard. I started my career as a musician behind the drums and drums are loud. So we're amps which want to be heard over the drums and monitors which need to be louder than the amps. It's a vicious circle of volume on stage as deep purples in and put it on their live album made in Japan. Yeah, can you have everything louder than everything else? Can I have everything louder than everything else? But these days we're all at risk of hearing loss regardless of occupation. We're carrying many amps around with us in our smartphones and sticking tiny monitors in our ears. It's like everyone's on stage all day long. The World Health Organization issued a report this year warning that 1.1 billion young people are now at risk of hearing loss from personal audio devices and what they called unsafe listening practices. You can have a seat when you're ready. So we saw you about a year ago. Do you feel like your hearing has changed since then? No, I don't. But they're shouting in the wind. Not only has digital made audio more portable and more prevalent, it's made it louder. In the first 20 years after the introduction of the CD, the average music recording grew louder by a factor of 10. These loudness wars, as they come to be known, have settled into a kind of datant now and somewhat leveled off. But no one has gone back to the levels we used in analog days. The reason is that digital allows the boosting of signal without the boosting of noise. Signal and noise are always joined together in the analog world. Think of an LP with its surface noise. If you turn up the volume, you turn up the noise too. Now consider a digital signal, like this podcast. There's no noise on it from the medium. No surface noise like an LP, no tape hiss, like a cassette, no static, like on the radio. So if you turn up the volume, you get more volume. In the digital audio world, everything can be louder than everything else. There's no noise to restrain signal. But if everything is loud, is anything really audible? There's more to noise than the scratch of an old LP. This is Ways of Hearing, a six-part podcast from Mediotopia's Showcase, exploring the nature of listening in our digital world. I'm Damon Krueckowski, a musician and a writer. In each episode, we'll look at a different way that the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, of space, of love, money, and power. This is about sound. The medium we're sharing together now. But I'm worried about the quality of that sharing, because we don't seem to be listening to each other very well right now in the world. Our voices carry further than they ever did before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard? Episode 6 - Signal and Noise I learned to think about sound in terms of signal and noise in the recording studio, but it turns out doctors use the same terminology. If you think about what noise means, I think that's probably the signal that you're not interested in. And so a lot of what we do is ear surgeons is to try to amplify the signal and decrease the noise. That's Alicia Quinnell of Harvard Medical School, otologist and surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and ear infirmary, and my hearing doctor. But the, you know, the ear is just a beautifully designed instrument, naturally, where it relies on the richness that you get from having 30,000 neurons that people are born with, which allows your brain, then a combination with your actual peripheral ear to feel the sort out what the signal is, it's important to listen to and to hear that above the noise. To Dr. Quinnell, signal is whatever sound we are trying to pay attention to. That's a constantly shifting target. Picture yourself in a crowded restaurant. Your dinner partner is saying something across the table that you want to hear. That's signal, and everything else in the restaurant is noise. But then someone at another table says something of interest to you. As you eavesdrop, that voice becomes signal, and whatever is being said at your table is now the noise. We're very skilled at shifting our attention from signal to signal, focusing and refocusing on different sounds in the environment and shutting out others. As Dr. Quinnell says, we have a rich field of sound to work with, 30,000 neurons worth, at least to start. And all of that is noise, until we decide what is signal. You know, the richness of noise includes everything that you're hearing. It's everything that you're hearing, the background noise, which you may not be paying attention to. Obviously your brain tries to pay attention to the signal, but there's a lot of other sounds that are going on that are constantly being recorded, essentially, or sensed by your ears. So everything's in there in the noise. Right, right. What happens with hearing loss is we lose some of the richness of that noise, and with it our ability to distinguish differences in it, and pull whatever signal we're interested in away from the rest. That crowded restaurant, as anyone who's dying with someone older knows well, becomes a mass of indistinguishable sounds. And hearing aids don't help that situation. They just amplify all the same sounds, making them louder, but no more distinguishable from one another. It's the same problem as the loudness wars. Volume alone can't help us find the signal in the noise. In a recording studio, microphones open up a rich field of sound, just as Dr. Quinnell describes for our ears. But instead of our brain, it's then up to an audio engineer to decide what in that signal and what is noise, maximizing one and minimizing the other. That decision might not have anything to do with what we typically call noisy. Think of a distorted electric guitar playing through an amp. The guitarist might be making very deliberate use of noisy sounds. I deal mostly with punk rockers and people who have cheap equipment, so the noise just comes along, you know. That's Steve Albini, the meticulous engineer well known for recording bands like the Pixies, Nirvana, PJ Harvey, and many, many others, as well as his own noisy music. But even in punk rock, there are noises and engineer wants to highlight and ones they don't. Good audio engineers are very attuned to distinctions in what others might hear as simply noise. Okay, it's an obsession. All right. Steve runs Electrical Audio, a recording studio he built together with his bandmate and fellow engineer Bob Weston. Together, they told me a story about an unwanted noise that proved particularly hard to minimize. We spoke in front of an audience in their hometown of Chicago. We did have a kind of a rage-inducing episode. There was this ratcheting noise. It's like guitar amplifiers. We had an electromagnetic interference specialist fly in from Canada. It was nuts. One of our engineers, a guy named Greg Norman, is one of our engineers, he built a thing to. Like a direction range fire. Well, there were two things. My favorite one though is he built a thing that was a fender guitar pickup on a fishing pole, and a battery-powered amplifier, and he walked around the neighborhood with this thing sniffing in the air. We made an elaborate map that had this studio and then concentric rings showing how loud the buzzing was. And it turned out that there was a photocopier that was in this guy's office, and it wasn't even their main photocopier. It was just the one that he went like when he needed to photocopy Snoopy to put on his door or whatever, you know. And so then we had this routine, like if the noise ever showed up, we called the receptionist at the printing company next door and said, "Hey, this is the studio next door, could you go ask Bob to shut off his photocopier for us?" The engineers at Electrical Audio needed to trace that unwanted noise so they could better record the signal they were after. And that's a decision constantly being made in the recording studio, from the placement of mics, through the balance of different sounds and mixing, all the way to the final stage of mastering. Audio engineers are choosing what to highlight for listeners as signal and what to minimize as noise. But one of the reasons I love analog recording is that you can never completely eliminate the noise. Even after fishing for it with a pickup all around the neighborhood, there's going to be something in there more than just the signal you were after. It's in the nature of the medium. Turn up the volume on the paragons of analog recording like the Beatles Sergeant Peppers or the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds, and you'll find all kinds of sounds alongside the signal that has been put in the foreground. Those recordings are rich with noise. The tracks are drummed in the way the guitars and canals were mixed together. You couldn't tell. It's just one big sound, you know. That's Brian Wilson, the songwriting and production wonderkin behind the Beach Boys most elaborate recordings. His studio techniques are admired by musicians and audio engineers of all stripes because of the remarkable sound textures he was able to weave together. He based that approach on his hero Phil Specter's idea of a wall of sound. In Pet Sounds we utilize what we call the Phil Specter technique which in the 20th century it's quite a scientific advancement in music and sound, namely that it's taking instruments and combining them to form them into a new sound. In other words if you took a piano and a guitar and combined them properly sound-wise, mixed two sounds together, you'd come up with a new instrument or a new sound. Brian Wilson was interested in the combination of sounds, hearing what happens when you rub together, not in isolating them one from the other. We're having a look that the drum thing seems to be a little inconsistent. Which means as meticulous and demanding a producer as he was, he wasn't particularly concerned about noises on his recordings. In an instrumental break to the Pet Sounds track here today, you can even hear a casual conversation taking place in the studio that was accidentally picked up by the mics. Noise is unavoidable in any live recording because mics are like our ears. They hear everything. The signal they pick up is always surrounded by noise. Or you might say everything they pick up is noise. Producers and engineers simply direct their attention toward what they want to highlight as signal. Today, digital recording has a very different way of working with signal and noise. Take an extreme example of digital music. One made entirely in a computer without any physical instruments or microphones. You can now make music like that even on your smartphone using Garage Band or another program with virtual instruments. But if you start to combine many virtual instruments together, you may notice you don't get a wall of sound like Phil Specters or Brian Wilson's. Instead, you get a loudness wall. The reason is that virtual instruments are all signal. There's nothing else to them, but the foreground sound they're meant to convey. As you pile them up, you don't get a richness of noise. You get a bunch of competing signals. That lack of noise can extend to live recording in the digital medium too, even a recording that uses traditional physical instruments and microphones. In that case, the noise that enters the system may be pretty much the same as an analog recording. But once those sounds are digitized, it's much easier to isolate and manipulate them. We're all familiar with that process from our digital tools, whatever we use them for. From word processing, to image manipulation, to audio recording, the commands are pretty much the same. Highlight, select, and delete. In digital media, if you can point to something, you can usually eliminate it. It's even happened to pet sounds. In 1996, 30 years after its original release, Capital Records commissioned a digital remix of the album. This time, with the original tapes all transferred to a computer, that conversation in the background of here today could be isolated. Do you have that attached to the flash? Do you have rigged up? And then, it could be deleted. Here's the 1996 digital remix of that same instrumental break. Turn it up as loud as you want. You won't hear those unintended noises in the background any longer. When you choose, as a listener, to focus on what's buried deep in the layers of a recording, instead of what's been placed up front to catch your attention, then you've changed what is signal and what is noise. But if the noise has been eliminated, as digital media can and so often do, then that choice is eliminated as well. If you've been following this podcast, we've seen examples of this in every episode. In episode one, we heard the difference between real time, the flexible time experienced and expressed by human musicians, and machine time, which is used by computers. Machine time is all signal. But the way a human drummer plays, the spaces between beats are felt as much as the hits, each emerges out of that background. In episode two, we considered the role of noise in urban space, and the way that digital audio is now allowing us to control the signals we hear in public. Whatever we hear through headphones commands our attention, regardless of who or what is around us, cocooning each of us in signal even as we occupy shared space. In episode three, we compared the quality of expression using all the noise in our voices against the way cell phones isolate the signal of our words alone. Without all the other sounds around our words, our breath, our proximity, our tone, we lose the fullness of their meaning. Episode four looked at the way that the internet has altered the terms of exchange for music, but that too can be seen as a question of signal and noise. Streaming services strip recorded sound away from its physical format, isolating the signal of music and deleting the noise of its context. Not only the material package, but all the information that went along with it, the songwriters, producers, even the names of many musicians themselves. Finally, in episode five, we took up the issue of how these isolated digital signals are being manipulated by online corporations. Or you might even say how we're each being transformed into signal for profitable use by those businesses. In other words, this question of signal and noise is about more than which mix of pet sounds you prefer. It has significance far beyond the kinds of arguments, music fanatics love to have with each other, because the real difference is between a world enriched by noise and a world that strives towards signal only. To me, that is the essential change we've been experiencing in this shift from analog to digital communications. I've addressed it here through sound because that's what I know best as a musician, but also because it's the medium we're sharing now in this podcast. Throughout the series, my aim has been to call attention to aspects of sound we may not always think about. You might say I've been trying to highlight different parts of the noise around us. And that's because it's my hope that by listening to a wider swath of noise, we might discover more about what is meaningful signal for each of us. And how we might best share those signals with one another. [Music] This has been Ways of Hearing. Thank you for listening. [Music] [Music] Showcase. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]